What is Growth Hack Marketing?

Growth Hack Marketing are new words to the vast majority of companies, but it has long been a method practiced by the best marketing agencies and technology companies in Silicon Valley. The term “Growth Hacker” was first used in 2010 by Sean Ellis, CEO of Qualaroo, one of the largest consumer analysis software companies in the world. In an article from his blog that year, Sean said “Growth Hacker is a person whose true goal is just growth”. Andrew Chen, a respected Startups investor such as Uber, Dropbox, Kiva and others, predicted that same year that Growth Hackers would be the new Vice Presidents of marketing for modern communication.

Growth Hacker Marketing is based on three pillars: Creativity, Analytical Thinking and Social Metrics. It is a process, it is not a secret book of ideas. Growth strategies cannot be copied and pasted from product to product, each strategy is unique, so it is necessary to have detailed studies on the product and niche market. Growth is never instantaneous, never is from day to night.

Who is the Professional Growth Hacker Marketing?

Growth hacker is a professional who is passionate about growth and focused on the methodology of exploring analytical data to develop testable and scalable business solutions. The essential feature of a Growth Hacker is creativity: Your mind is the best tool in your toolbox. The ultimate goal of any Growth Hacker is to build a marketing machine that impacts thousands of people in an often-unconventional way and most importantly, that growth is fast and consolidated.

Growth hacking is an essential area for the development of technology startups. A growth hacker often uses strategies in social networks and viral marketing to achieve set goals, always with creative initiatives. Every company has the ambition to grow, and many believe that this growth happens overnight, the result of “an action that worked.” If anyone gets this sudden growth, it is the exception. It is possible to grow consistently over time with a methodology that can be applied to any size of company and area of ​​expertise. In practice, the line of reasoning is very simple:

Focus efforts on the main problem / lever of the company;

Think of improvements to this focus and prioritize the best ideas;

Model the simplest way to test this new idea and apply it;

Ensure that you learn from your successes and failures;

Use this learning to generate new tests.

A growth hacker is the person responsible for defining the strategies that will lead to the growth of the company or institution. He has absolute focus on growth, and in order to achieve it, he uses methods and tools to create practices that stimulate growth. Ultimately, growth hacking is a way of rewriting and improving a company’s growth. Some globally known companies are examples of growth hacking marketing: Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Airbnb, etc.

Growth Hacking and Marketing

Several authors establish differences between growth hacking and marketing. They claim that the goal of growth hacking is not to replace marketing, and that the growth hacker is no better than the marketer, but has a different focus. According to Sean Ellis, a growth hacker “is a person whose growth is north.” This way, growth hacker defines all strategies, tactics and initiatives based on growth. Marketing also gives importance to growth, but not as much as growth hacking. In addition, growth hacking is known to have an obsessive focus on one goal, often ignoring other aspects.

In conclusion, there are tools that help the work of a Growth Hacker. However, the simple use of them does not mean that the ideas behind Growth Hacking are actually being applied. The replication of strategies adopted by other companies may also appear to apply these concepts. These strategies, however, are very particular to each situation, which means a company results cannot be applied across the board. Growth Hacking is more than a set of tools or strategies. Rather, it is a mindset where “growth” is the focus of an organization as a whole. Through creative and unique strategies for each scenario, the ultimate goal seeks the acquisition of new users, improvements of the current platform aimed at a greater retention of the existing users, and the highest rates of user base growth.